A Baby Changes Everything
Let me begin by wishing you a very merry and blessed Christmas. I hope you are having a wonderful day wherever you happen to be reading this. Last night the church I serve had a late night Christmas Eve Service. For the message I shared with them I found inspiration in the beautiful Christmas song penned by K. K. Wiseman a few years ago that was recorded by Faith Hill. It is called A Baby Changes Everything. Obviously the coming of a baby into any home “changes everything” but never was that so true as the child that Mary brought into the world that first Christmas long ago.
In my Christmas homily I talked about how the baby who was born in Bethlehem long ago went on to change how we look at God, how we look at ourselves and also how we are to look at others. I very easily could have gone on to talk about how the coming of Jesus also changes the way that we are to look at the earth. There are a number of different ways this is true.
The first chapter of Genesis makes it clear that the earth is “good.” After each day of Creation God declared that what He had made was (is) good. Later the Psalmist would declare that “the earth is the Lord’s.” (24:1) The fact that God made and owns the earth would indicate that it is quite special. But realizing that God actually came to earth and for a time made His dwelling here (John 1:14) makes it clear that the earth should also be viewed as holy or sacred. This planet of our was blessed to be visited by its Maker. That fact alone sets the earth apart. We should learn to view this place we live as holy ground and treat it as such.
Jesus would also change the way we look at the earth when he repeatedly used the world of nature as teaching tools for spiritual principles. The earth, for him, contained a repository of divine lessons. He told us to pay attention to the birds above us and to the flowers at our feet. In his parables he often pointed to plants and other natural objects as divine indicators. The way Jesus looked at the world should change the way we look at it too. Like him, we are to see the earth as a school of higher learning—much higher learning!
The one born at Bethlehem not only used the natural world as object lessons in his teaching ministry, he also sought the presence of his Father there. We know that Jesus did attend the synagogues of Palestine and visited the Temple in Jerusalem on a number of occasion but we also learn in the Gospels that it was his custom to find solitude with God on lonely hillsides and in the stillness of garden enclosures. Later some of Jesus’ followers would come to view the world as evil. He, however, found it to be a place where God can be found and encountered in a multitude of different ways. We should look at the earth in the same way.
Today I am very thankful for the many changes the baby born in Bethlehem has made in my life. I, and hopefully others too, now see God, myself, others and the earth itself differently because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
–Chuck
(I took the three pictures used above not far from my home in Henderson, Kentucky.)